The Complete guide to Marketing Strategy with Facebook

The Complete guide to developing a Marketing Strategy with Facebook

We know that Facebook is not new, and we also know that it is essential to all businesses. Many changes have taken place on Facebook since its launch in 2006. Today, the world’s largest social network can do things that many entrepreneurs, marketer, and entrepreneur have always dreamed of doing: 360 videos, sale of products and many more.

Facebook is more than 1.2 billion active users every day around the world, which is approximately 15% of the world’s population that connects every day on the same site! And this is not about to stop there. On average, a user stays 50 minutes a day connected. A new estimate: 1/18 of his day is devoted to Facebook. As well:

1.2 billion users are active each day;

45% of marketers think that their actions are effective.

For many, Facebook is like the internet: they seek information, have fun, buy … This means that you must take advantage of it for your business. Is that the case?

The Facebook pages are in a way the gateway that allows you to be in contact with users (customers). A Facebook page is a public space that looks like a personal profile, with the difference that it allows fans to “like” and “follow” your business, your brand, your organization … Fans receive updated content from this page on their newsfeed and in parallel, on your side, you bring your business back into the minds. You track and share ads, collect data, or you can communicate live with your community.

Thereafter, you will find everything you need to become a master in the field (on Facebook). It does not matter whether your page has been around for years or just started, this guide is for you who want to know more about using Facebook.

THE MARKETING STRATEGY WITH FACEBOOK, A STEP TOWARDS INBOUND

Before going further, know that there are several strategies for Facebook. We will focus on the one we love most: the inbound.

Inbound marketing is the faculty to be useful and to be adapted to its audience. It involves understanding the goals of your customers and working with them to overcome these challenges. One of the best solutions is to be available where they spend their time. This means that you have to be present on Facebook.

Facebook tools meet the needs of companies that want to create a real relationship with their community. They allow entrepreneurs, marketers … to create and distribute quality content. Also, they allow to sell and manage the customer relationship.

It’s not about becoming a spammer, boring or disappointing.

If you create a Facebook page just to tick a box in your to-do list, think again. A true marketing strategy with Facebook requires a long-term commitment. But it is certain that the knowledge and demands of your brand that will result from your efforts will only encourage you to continue.

Ready? Let’s go.

HOW TO SET UP A FACEBOOK PAGE?

If you chose to create your business page, you made the right choice. Indeed, you will join more than 60 million organizations around the world.

Before understanding how to publish and boost your posts with advertising, let’s start from the beginning the process of setting up.

CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE

First, there is an essential aspect to be clarified. As you probably know, the essence of Facebook is mostly personal profiles. However, if your company is trying to establish its presence on the social network, you will have to create a page instead. It is strongly discouraged for an organization to present itself via a personal profile as a natural person. For starters, you will not respect the conditions of use of Facebook and may then see your account permanently blocked. Then you will not enjoy all the benefits that business pages offer.

The Facebook pages are aesthetically similar to those of the profiles but have the particularity to present specific information, only applicable to companies, organizations, associations … Rather than to connect to a profile by adding it to its list of friends, you log in to a business page by “liking” and becoming “fan”.

At this moment, you will be able to choose between 6 different categories:

Local Business or place;

Business, organization or administration;

Brand or Product ;

Artist, brand or personality;

Entertainment;

Cause or Community.

Depending on the option you choose, the fields about your page will be editable.

A tip, take the name of your business and choose the name of your page with attention. Facebook will allow you to change it in most cases, but the process is long and delicate.

Be aware that it is necessary to have a personal profile to manage a business page. This operation is completely imperceptible for future fans of your page. Nobody will know who manages your page. Moreover, you will have the possibility to name several people with various roles for the management of your page.

Subsequently, your page is created. Facebook gives you 4 tips to get started:

ADD A PROFILE PICTURE (LOGO)

The first step to give an identity to your Facebook page is to add a profile picture. This is the main visual element to identify your page. It will appear in the search results and in each of your posts that will be displayed in the news feed of your fans. Generally, it is advisable to use an image with dimensions of 180 × 180 px, but by increasing slightly, you will gain in quality. However, if you do not import an image in the right dimensions, you can always crop it.

Think of the first impression of your profile picture, it must immediately be recognizable. Use your logo is strongly recommended.

ADD A COVER PHOTO

Then Facebook advises you to add a cover photo. This is a horizontal photo that crosses the top of your page with the dimensions of 851 × 315 px.

Keep in mind that this cover photo may be modified later. We encourage you to update it every two months or when you need to promote news. Be careful not to change your cover picture every day, you risk confusing your audience.

It is also a good idea to include a sentence on your photo and a link in its description if you are promoting a particular campaign.

Now that your page is dressed with some visuals, it is necessary to add a description to inform your audience of your activities. This short description should only be 1 or 2 lines for up to 155 characters (as would be a tweet, well that was before) about your business. This description will appear both on your page and in the search results, so be clear and brief. But do not deprive yourself of showing your personality.

CREATE AN IDENTIFIER FOR YOUR PAGEZ

The last step for this startup is to create an identifier for your page. This identifier will be included in the personalized URL of your page. The limit is 50 characters for your ID.

We talked about it before, you can manage your Facebook business page with other people with defined roles. No need to share your password, you only need to designate the people who will be able to intervene on your page by defining an access level: The “roles of the page”:

Administrator: Administrators can manage all aspects of the page: they can send messages, publish, reply to or delete comments, create advertisements, see which profile publishes a post on the page, and modify user roles. This person has all the powers on the page just like the original creator. This is a role to be defined with care;

Publisher : Publishers have the same powers as administrators except that they cannot change the roles of the page;

Moderator : Moderators can send messages and reply or delete comments, but they cannot post to the page;

Advertiser : As its name suggests, they are able to create ads (ads) and track results;

Analyst: They have no power on the page. They can only see who publishes and follows the results;

Live Contributor: Have you thought about creating live Facebook? We will come back to it later. It’s about people only able to launch lives from their mobile and nothing else.

While you manage the preferences of your page, it is good to define those of the notifications (sometimes useful, but sometimes very cumbersome).

ADD AN CTA TO YOUR PAGE

Another essential point of your Facebook page: CTA.

One of the main advantages of your business page is to be able to engage an audience that you have not yet been able to attract with a traditional website.

Since 2014, Facebook has allowed pages to offer a CTA at the top of its page. You can set this call-to-action button by choosing the options from the proposed list. Your choice will depend on your will: to propose an appointment, to make a purchase … Then, choose a link of destination which returns on a landing page.

CHOOSE THE MENUS OF YOUR PAGE

As for a website, the menu helps guide your visitor. On your corporate page, you also have the option of setting up this menu and even creating your own tabs. This is a technical part that requires a minimum of skills, so feel free to ask for help https://developers.facebook.com/apps

HAVE YOUR PAGE CHECKED

Another important element for a page is verification. You must have already noticed this difference between the pages which is justified by a blue pellet. Verifying your page is not mandatory, but it can give you credibility, especially if you are an e-commerce site or offer online services. Thus, you build trust to your prospects.

HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR FACEBOOK COMMUNITY?

Obviously, you want your Facebook page to be a success. However, this success on social networks will vary depending on your initial goals. Your willingness to sell, to develop your brand knowledge, to capture contacts…

But no matter, you must get “likes”.

In this part, we will give you some strategies to get likes as soon as your page is online and also, how to continue to grow your community.

WHY NOT BUY LIKES ON FACEBOOK?

Although very easy, the purchase of likes is strongly discouraged! Just go to Google and look for “buy likes Facebook”. For a handful of euros, you can suddenly increase your community by several hundred (fake) fans … One of the reasons that can push you to buy these fans is to give a better credibility to your page. This feeling that we all know, the famous world attracts the world.

But think again, this is not a good idea for your business or your fans. The origin of these fans is doubtful, it is usually false account or farms to likes. Once your page is liked, do not expect any more commitment with this pseudo community.

Good to know: Only a few of your posts appear in your fan’s news feed. The Facebook algorithm takes into account several parameters related to your account and in particular the commitment rate (number of people who interact with your publications / number of people who like your page * 100). Over time, lack of feedback, comments, or sharing can hurt your page, and so do not put your content forward to your real fans.

If this explanation about the long-term negative effects on your page is not convincing enough, also know that Facebook has complete teams that follow these strange behaviors. And if so, Facebook can simply decide to permanently delete your account. The most striking example of recent weeks is the closing of the page Fire rank which counted 12 million fans.

PROMOTE YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE

Now that we’ve seen what not to do to get likes, let’s see how to get them. Let’s start with promoting your page.

It is important to take the time to thoroughly complete the section about your page. Complete your description with searched keywords, but do not overdo it. Add an overview of your products, your offers, a link to your website, your schedule, your phone…

If you’re creating a new page, start sharing it with people in your “friends” circle with whom you’re connected.

Be careful, if you manage several pages, be careful not to spam your contacts by asking too often.

Finally, be responsive. A good way to get likes is to build a committed community. Share posts that serve or entertain your community. Give them the urge to react and share your content. Do not forget to reply to comments on your posts, whether positive or negative. Sometimes a simple “thank you” can please.

It is also very important to respond quickly to the messages you receive on your page. Your page can even get a badge from Facebook if you respond within 15 minutes (at least 90% of the messages received).

PROMOTE YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

When you receive public, your customers, and your prospects, be creative and let them know you have a Facebook page. Add a sticker on the window, add a flash code that links to your page near the cash register, indicate the URL of your page on your receipts, offer a discount to people who like your page…

For e-commerce sites, solutions also exist. For example, add the link of your page in the email signatures.

WHAT CONTENT TO PUBLISH ON FACEBOOK?

When talking about marketing strategy with Facebook, it is obvious that the content you are going to share is at the center of the concerns. Without a consistent and steady stream of content, your page will only be a source of information for people who already know your brand.

When you use Facebook to publish quality content, you open the doors of an infinitely large space populated by Facebook users. These users can discover your content and decide to follow your page. Over time, their trust in you increases, and you can expect it to be strong enough to go to the act of purchase.

POST VIDEOS ON FACEBOOK

Choosing video is opting for the best engagement from your fans. It’s also a pleasure to Facebook that will make you feel good. Indeed, in the latest versions of its algorithm, Facebook encourages pages to share videos, whether live videos or long videos with a high rate of viewing.

When we talk about video for Facebook, it’s not about sharing a YouTube video. You must upload your video directly to Facebook.

45% of viewers watch more than one hour of video on Facebook or YouTube each week

The first 5 seconds of your video are important. It’s up to you to have your fans stop to watch the whole video.

MAKE FACEBOOK LIVE

This feature of Facebook allows you to create live recordings from your smartphone. It is available to all users, and terribly effective at events to see backstage, for political rallies or when a brand wants to share with its community. It is a formidable weapon of storytelling.

To get the most out of it, we encourage you to interact with your audience. Once your live is activated, ask questions to encourage your fans to comment. Understand that all your fans will not be connected at the same time. In this case, it is wise to return to the subject of the live from time to time to explain to newcomers the interest of this video.

Once the live recording is finished, the video will be accessible on your page like any other video.

POST PHOTOS ON FACEBOOK

After the video, the photo gets the best commitment from your community. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth 1000 words”, the engagement of a post with an image is 2.3x more important than a post without a visual.

A question that often comes up when you want to post images on Facebook: which format to choose?

As with your profile photo and cover photo, the dimensions of the images you import into your posts must meet one or two standards. The recommended size for your visual is 1200 × 630 PX, but it is more important to remember the ratio: 1.9 × 1.

POST LINKS ON FACEBOOK

One of the most popular actions to promote your page, but also to attract fans to your site, is to share your blog posts.

Do not get into the sharing of all your articles or you will saturate your audience and see a disengagement rate more and more important. Select only those items that you think are most engaging to your audience.

To share a link, do not limit yourself to a simple copy and paste of the URL. Take the time to write a catchy phrase that should inspire action. Be careful of the links that you post, check that the Meta description is correctly filled, because Facebook takes it systematically.

Another important fact, remember to delete the URL that you copy on your post to leave only your sentence. The preview of the page will appear automatically and it will be clickable for users. Post instant articles on Facebook

Your Facebook page is to your site what the instant article is to your blog. Simply put, instant articles give you the ability to publish text and images without leaving Facebook.

The advantage is that the loading time of this article is much faster than a redirect to another website. You avoid losing your audience and disappointing them with content that does not load. The flip side of instant articles is that you do not develop the SEO of your site.

Today, with the democratization of the AMP format, instant articles have no real interest, except to be highlighted in the algorithms.

PUBLISH VIRTUAL REALITY VIDEOS ON FACEBOOK

The last, but not least, videos in virtual reality for Facebook. Certainly the future of these next years (even if everyone has been saying it for some time now).

Thanks to them, you can literally immerse your users in your world. The use of 360 ° videos is better suited to mobile because of the gyroscopes integrated in smartphones that allow you to live an immersive experience. And when you watch them with a specific headset, the experience is multiplied. The consumption of your content by your fan is much higher and above all you stand out from your competitors, because few companies use this type of publication (because more complex).

Now that you know the different types of posts you can share with your community, it’s important to know how they appear on your page. By “pinning” a post, you can decide to keep that content at the top of your page, although it is chronologically older than others.

HOW TO CREATE A MARKETING STRATEGY WITH FACEBOOK?

You now know how to post content on your Facebook page, but you certainly ask yourself: What and When to post. This is the biggest challenge of Facebook, one that will differentiate you from your competitors, make you become the brand to follow, the one you immediately think when talking about your industry.

As with the content strategy you apply to your website, the first step is to understand your audience. Then, you can develop the right mix of content to generate results and schedule your posts according to a well-defined schedule.

DEFINE YOUR BUYER PERSONAS

To define your audience, return to the start of your digital strategy. Who are the people you want to reach with your messages?

Buyer Personas are semi-fictional representations of your target prospects. They allow you to better understand the environment of your target, to know their needs, their problems, their challenges, their ways of consuming information … To define your buyer personas , the competition of all your team is necessary: the marketing, salespeople, support, production and all the other people related to your targets.

In the same way with Facebook, you have to define these buyer personas if it’s not done yet. By defining the needs and challenges of your target, you will be able to define what content to publish on your page

Advice for creating your buyer personas: Interview a panel of your clients, prospects, observe what your competitors are doing and analyze the market as a whole.

When you analyze the pages of your competitors, pay attention to these few indicators, and take the corresponding measures:

The quality of the visuals;

Response time ;

The plurality of contents;

The frequency of publication;

Commitment to publications;

The ratio between the engagement and the number of fans on the page.

As you make your page live, Facebook will offer you more and more relevant analytics about your audience: Facebook Insights.

This is a tool proposed in Facebook ads (which we will return to later), but you can still use without paying a penny in sponsorship.

Created to help advertisers better set their ads, this tool is useful for community managers and content creators to help them find the most popular types of posts in their audience.

CREATE A PUBLICATION SCHEDULE

The social media manager (who is a great person) plays the role of a true conductor. He must be able to post content on different platforms, follow brand mentions, reply to comments, and learn about the latest trends … and many other tasks that occupy very widely all his days. So, not to be in a panic after a meeting that has been extended a bit and have to plan a post in 5 minutes (not a publication on social networks it does not take 5 minutes), there is a solution: the schedule editorial.

Generally, it is a spreadsheet where are listed the next publications on days and hours well defined. Also, this schedule allows you to easily analyze what works for those who have more trouble.

Set your schedule as you see fit, according to your needs and desires. To help you, here is what we use at Hexagon Strategy:

Different windows by networks and a general one;

A daily calendar with time slots;

Columns for:

The name of the campaign

The messages ;

The links ;

The images / video.

HOW TO PROGRAM POSTS ON FACEBOOK

No matter what editorial plan you use, you will never be able to stop until your posts are scheduled.

To automatically schedule posts on Facebook, there are various solutions that may be useful:

WHAT ARE THE SCHEDULES TO PUBLISH ON FACEBOOK?

Above all, know that there is no generality. A good time of publication for you may not be ideal for another company. Again, it all depends on your audience. Think about when fans connect: at the office, at home, in transport…

However, studies show that the afternoons of the week, between 1 pm and 4 pm, and the weekends between noon and 1 pm, seem to be good niches to publish.

USE A CHATBOT ON FACEBOOK

You have probably already heard about artificial intelligence, catboats, and these programs that are able to respond to messages received on your page. You also say that it is not for you, because too complex, too expensive, too much too much. But think again, Facebook has democratized the Chabot for everyone.

Since the launch of Messenger in 2016, you are now able to create your own Chatbot.

With your personal profile, your use of Messenger is limited to exchanges with your friends from your computer or mobile. In the same way, the Chabot of a page can exchange with your audience depending on the settings you have made. This feature is very popular for e-commerce sites that can now sell directly via their Chabot.

TRACK AND ANALYZE THE RESULTS OF YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE

Now that you’ve spent time creating your page, working on creating quality content, planning your posts, and following the best practices we’ve shared from the beginning, do not stop.

All your efforts without tracking the results and analyzing the performance would be the equivalent of a bottle thrown into the sea, which means that you will have little chance of achieving your goals.

Fortunately, Facebook is thinking of you and has developed a tool for monitoring and analyzing statistics.

FACEBOOK AD FORMATS

Now that you have defined the characteristics of your promotional campaign, you will have to choose the form of your advertisement.

There are 5 different advertising formats:

Carousel;

Single image;

Single video;

Slide show

Now, it’s important to import the visuals that will dress your ad and create a catchy title (40 characters maximum).

Be careful, however, to the visuals you import. Facebook does not like to see too much text in the images, you may see your ad performing worse than expected. Use this Facebook tool to check your image .

You will understand, the use of Facebook for your digital marketing strategy is very important, but also very complete (and complex). Do not try to get on all the sites at the same time, it could hurt you. Prefer the quality to the quantity. Now that you have the keys to the success of your business on Facebook, all you have to do is apply these best practices.

Do not hesitate to give us feedback on this article if we missed some essential features, but also and especially to tell us your progress.